Tuesday, February 19, 2019

DANCE NATION: A Play About [Very Dirty] Dancing Nymphets


Here’s part of the plot summary for Dance Nation (2018) that’s posted on Playwrights Horizons:

Somewhere in America, an army of pre-teen competitive dancers plots to take over the world. And if their new routine is good enough, they’ll claw their way to the top at the Boogie Down Grand Prix in Tampa Bay. But in Clare Barron’s raucous pageant of ambition and ferocity, these young dancers have more than choreography on their minds [...].

Here’s an excerpt from the “Notes on casting, etc”: All characters except Dance Teacher Pat and The Moms are between the ages of 11 and 14 years old. However, they should be played by adult actors (for the most part) [...]

With that in mind, here's some relevant parts of Dance Nation:

1. In the play, references are made to the “little girls” having “little bodies”. 

2. In scene 4: “THE GIRLS are changing into their street clothes. They get completely, uninhibitedly butt-ass naked in front of each other as they talk [...]

3. Teen masturbation is a motif in the play. For example, also in scene 4, SOFIA asked AMINA, the star dancer, “Did you do it?” 
AMINA: Huh? 
SOFIA makes a gesture like she’s thwacking a pussy.
AMINA: I tried
SOFIA: You tried?
AMINA: Nothing happened
SOFIA: Nothing happened???!!!
AMINA: I don’t know why. I really tried!
SOFIA: What did you do? ASHLEE: Wait. What’s happening?
CONNIE (To ASHLEE.) She’s teaching Amina how to masturbate. 

Subsequently, SOFIA informed AMINA that she’s supposed to think about something while masturbating. CONNIE shared that she thinks about Luke, the only male dancer on the team. But à la some of the teen rape fantasies described in My Secret Garden, ASHLEE shared: "I mostly think about someone being really mad at me. And pinning me to the ground. And like. Yelling."

4. In scene 8, while DANCE TEACHER PAT is out of the room, Amina instructs the other nymphets: 

And move your pussy into fifth position
Dimi plié and…
[...]
Bend at the pussy...and...bring your pussy back up…

5. Subsequently, ASHLEE shared that she would show the audience her “epic” ass but that she’s only thirteen. In addition, she related that men like to “stroke” her ass and that she has “a really nice face” and “great tits”.




As the other nymphets stare in “awe”, ASHLEE continues:

[...] and you’re going to cum just by eating my cunt, the taste of my cum is going to make you cum because it’ll be the greatest sexual pleasure you have ever known [...] That’s what I’ve got inside this tiny fucking body of mine [...] 

Now we know why it states in the "Note on casting, etc": 

All characters except Dance Teacher Pat and The Moms are between the ages of 11 and 14 years old. However, they should be played by adult actors (for the most part) [...] There is no need for any of the actors to resemble teenagers. (In fact, please resist this impulse!)



6. In scene 9, DANCE TEACHER PAT, “a grown-ass man”, swats AMINA’s butt. AMINA is “horrified” but “she loves it’ too:

He sort of swats her butt. It’s not sexual???????? But also weird and uncomfortable for a  grown-ass man to be swatting a thirteen-year-old’s butt. AMINA is horrified. And also, she loves it. 

7. In scene 11, in a effort to motivate the other nymphets who are nervous about competing against a dance team that has "advanced-level boys", SOFIA exclaimed:

WE’RE GONNA MAKE THEM FINGER US UNTIL THEIR FINGERS FALL OFF AND THEN WE’RE GONNA EAT THEIR FINGERS IN FRONT OF THEIR FACES!!!!!!

8. By scene 13: AMINA [is] on her stomach. A pillow between her legs. [...] AMINA [successfully] masturbates.

9. And lastly, in scene 14, there’s a bit of teen lipstick lesbianism:
ASHLEE blows on CONNIE’s upper lip. She kisses her on the mouth.

Interestingly, Sara Holdren wrote in her New York Magazine theater review of Dance Nation

“If you were a thirteen-year-old girl, Clare Barron’s daring, raw Dance Nation will probably hit you hard...It’s a brave, visceral, excitingly off-kilter barbaric yawp of a play...And it gets at something excruciatingly tender: the burden of modesty on [very] young American women.” 


Tuesday, February 5, 2019

Seidel's PEACHES GOES IT ALONE: Poetry About Nude Schoolgirls & More...


We profiled the poet Frederick Seidel in The Allure of Nymphets and he continues to write about nympholepsy and age-discrepant attraction in his latest book Peaches Goes It Alone .. 
For example, the poem “Miss Charlotte” is about “undressed” schoolgirls “lying on top” of one another in a dorm-room of an all-girls boarding school, which caused aristocrats to take “cold showers”:

Bring back the all-girls boarding schools for pedigreed girls
Where, morning and night, girls dressed and undressed.
Luxurious lawns and trees rode to hounds.
Horses the girls owned waited in padded stalls. 

Think of the cold showers these aristocrates took.
Think of the dorm-room mirrors which sometimes saw
A cold girl lying on top of a warm girl
While a pretty girl with a pimply face on her bed on her back watched

The scene in the dorm-room reminded me of a scene in the controversial National Bestseller The End of Alice where imprisoned Chappy shared a story about his teen penpal:

She writes of the memory of one particular afternoon [...] The story is of coming into the cabin to collect her tennis racket and finding the two little girls from Louisville, Kentucky [...] lying across the top bunk, head to toe, the brunette’s narrow foot sweeping back and forth across the strawberry blonde’s nipple, the blonde’s jumpsuit unzipped and parted to the waist. When the lovebirds sighted the girl and smiled at her, there was a flash of light like an explosion, as the sun, reflecting off the brunette’s metal tooth-braces [...]

And I was reminded of a story that Humbert related in Lolita about one of Lolita’s tent-mates:

Her astounding tale started with an introductory mention of her tent-mate of the previous summer, at another camp, a “very select” one as she put it. The tent-mate [...] instructed her in various manipulations. [...] I wanted to know if either mother learned of those sapphic diversions? “Gosh no,” exhaled limp Lo [...] 

In 2016, Seidel was approximately 80-years-old; thus, his reference in the first two stanzas of “Thanksgiving 2016” to a girl with a “charming” face, a charming voice and a “beautiful ass” who could cure “depression” is revealing:

The girl with the face
As charming as her voice
Has a beautiful ass
Filling out her tan pants.

Depression doesn’t stand a chance
Confronted with this one!
What planet are you on
In your beret, singing?

“Near The New Whitney” is about the poet being “moonstruck” by Emily, a “gently lovely” maître d’, at a “charming restaurant” in the Meatpacking District. But after discussing the transformation of American art, the poet ended the poem with a desirable double entendre:

I drank an after-dinner tumbler of whiskey
Not far from the new Whitney,
A present from the maître d’.
Sweet Lagavulin single malt filled me with infinity
Sixteen years old, while the girl 
Smiled softly

Emily appears again in the fifth and sixth stanzas of “Worst When It’s Poetry”. This time she’s referred to as a “maiden” and “so young”:

There’s an Emily I met downtown recently.
Dante’s Beatrice suddenly appeared to me!
I don’t know her last name.
Dante famously never was the same.

A maiden I don’t know transfigured me
In one brief moment for eternity.
From one brief meeting with someone so young,
Dante translated to a higher sphere and left our days of dung. 

And the book is lightly peppered with stanzas that allude to nympholepsy. For example, in “In Late December”: She’s reading a paperback of Lolita, stealthily, behind the sign. And in “Abusers”: The little girl whose father invaded her/Became a woman who could not outgun/The little girl inside her who’s her father’s wife.

Lastly, here's one of the blurbs from the back of the book:

"There had never been a poet like this one before: the poet of a new contemporary form, a highlight reel-one spectacular feat after another [...]" - Dan Chiasson, The New York Review of Books




Sunday, February 3, 2019

TRUST (2010): An Online Nymphet is Betrayed


Here's IMDb's plot summary for Trust (2011): 

A suburban [Chicago] family is torn apart when fourteen-year-old Annie [...] meets her first boyfriend online. After months of communicating via online chat and phone, Annie discovers her friend [Charlie] is not who he originally claimed to be. Shocked into disbelief, her parents [...] are shattered by their daughter's actions and struggle to support her as she comes to terms with what has happened to her once innocent life.

Initially, Charlie informed Annie that he was 16, then 20, and then 25, but when they met, Charlie appeared to be in his 30s. 


Annie was initially distraught, but Charlie reassured her by stating, "I love you. Annie, I don't get why age has to change that." Subsequently, the age-gap couple had ice cream at a parlor before they had sex in a cheap hotel despite Annie's pleads of, "Charlie, wait!"


Afterwards, to Annie's dismay, Annie's best friend informed a school administrator about Charlie, which resulted in an FBI investigation and counseling.

IMDb's plot summary opined that Annie was "innocent", but the FBI's transcripts of Annie and Charlie's chats proved otherwise. 

Annie: "I can't stop thinking about it. You inside me. I get wet when I picture it. How big are you? I bet you taste good. I wanna see it right now." To which her father replied, "She's 14![...] Our daughter sounds like a fucking porn star!"


Here's an excerpt from the Annie's counseling session:

Annie: "You think I need help?
Counselor: "I think that what you've been through must be very difficult."
Annie: "Yeah, what's the big deal? There are girls at my school who've had sex with half the football team. I lose my virginity [to an older man] and my parents make a federal case out of it. Literally"


In the end, Annie fell out of love with Charlie, but not due to their age difference. Annie came to consider Charlie compliments on her beauty to be crushingly insincere after she discovered that Charlie had sex with [at least] three other nymphets whom Annie opined, "They weren't even that pretty!"

Lastly, David Schwimmer took some directorial liberties by sexualizing Annie (14-year-old Liana Liberato) (e.g., pink spandex volleyball "shorts", pink with white polka dot panties, an underwear advertisement, etc). 


And despite the comments on IMDb, Trust (2010) is an inaccurate portrayal of online predators, because a nymphet is more likely to be sexually molested by her father, brother or uncle than an online or offline stranger.